On I-95 somewhere north of Boston, Howard’s eyes were wet too. He loved Skye… Had loved her more than life itself. His breezy, beautiful songstress. She’d loved his stability after a childhood with commune-living parents who spent their days stoned, talking about permaculture farming and the spirits of the wind. But her spirit had been like the wind too and perhaps it was inevitable she would grow bored of him. But was that all it was? Boredom? Their life lacked adventure, that was one constant complaint from Skye. You’re so pragmatic, there’s not an esoteric bone in your body! Isn’t that why she married him? Maybe they should have had kids, but that was something she resisted. Their slight misalignment on so many things seemed to have widened through the years until now all the gaps appeared insurmountable.
He took the Yankee Division Highway off I-95, squinted at his phone’s GPS as it directed him towards Essex Bay. The leaden skies broke, rain bucketing over the windscreen as he finally spotted the sign directing him north: Innsmouth, 6 Miles.
“Backwater place for the conference,” Howard muttered as the day grew unseasonably dark, even for the end of October.
Head Office had sung the virtues of the location, old world charm and a powerful sense of the macabre, like a town that time forgot. “This year is an auspicious one for the company,” the memo had said. “And we’re returning to the source for a very special conference.” Perfect for the best Halloween party yet devised, apparently. Always in place of a Christmas celebration, Day & Gohn Inc. made its fortune from Halloween merchandise, so that holiday was its central focus. Until now the annual conference had always been in Pittsburgh, much nearer to Howard. Why the CEO, Geoffrey Day, had insisted on the change was a mystery.
Howard drove past Essex Bay, out of sight in the darkness somewhere east of him, and entered Innsmouth. He was exhausted, eyes red and gritty from the long journey, strained from staring through the downpour. All he wanted was a hot bath and a soft bed, tomorrow would be better. He missed Skye already.
The rain fell, hard and heavy, and he slowed, staring past the swiftly whipping wipers at a town of wide extent and dense construction. Everywhere seemed dark and still, though it was only just before seven o’clock. Few lights shone in the windows, chimney pots stood inert on sagging gambrel roofs. As the road descended towards the harbour, the sense of broken down decay became stronger, some roofs fallen in entirely, some walls missing windows like skulls with black, empty eye sockets. Other buildings were in better condition, Georgian houses with cupolas and widow’s walks guarded by curlicued iron railings. Three tall steeples stood out against the ocean horizon, black against the dark of night. Howard drove past a factory built of brick, sturdier looking than most buildings he had seen, though the majority of the rest of the waterfront bore structures seemingly uninhabitable due to decay.
Not so much old world charm but a derelict, forgotten ghost town. Where was everyone? He passed the sand-clogged harbour surrounded by stone breaker walls and there, on a slight rise above the small port, was the Deepwater Hotel. That, at least, was well-lit, an air of vibrancy about it. He turned onto Maron Road to access the lot and parked, the hammer of rain the only sound after he killed the engine. Cold permeated the car, as though the turning of the key had swung wide some unseen refrigerator door behind him.
With a shiver, he got out, hunched against the rain, to smell a sharp, briny tang of saltwater and old seaweed on the icy breeze. He dragged his case from the trunk and ran to the hotel lobby. No one greeted him at the door, the reception desk unmanned. From somewhere distant he heard the quiet murmur of voices and the chink of glasses. He realised a stiff drink before his bath and bed would be most welcome, assuming it didn’t involve too much socialising. He wasn’t yet ready for people, Skye’s disappointment still raw and smarting. Had she really finished with him right there by the front door? The chasm between them finally whole? Surely there was a way to find common ground again if they tried.
“Help you? Conference is it?”
Howard jumped, the disembodied voice sudden and sibilant. He turned, no one to be seen. When he returned his gaze to the desk he jumped again, a man waiting as if he had been there all along, looking with one eyebrow raised. Had he been there all along? Surely Howard would have noticed. The man’s face was pale, almost grey, his mouth flat and wide, eyes too large as he stared.
“Yes, conference,” Howard managed, unsettled by the cold perusal. “Howard Bloch,” he added, and spelled out his surname. People always assumed a CK.
“Three-fifteen, third floor. No lift, broken. Stairs are that way.” The pointing finger was greyer than the man’s face, long and trembling slightly as it indicated dark wooden stairs, highly polished, with a thick bannister and intricate balusters like kelp weed twisting upwards.
Howard glanced down at his heavy case, fatigue sinking deeper into his bones. He opened his mouth to speak and the clerk said, “No bellboy. Finished for the day.”
“Right.” Howard took the offered key, careful not to touch the pale hand, and turned away.
“Dagon’s eyes see you.”
Howard turned back. “Pardon me?”
“I said have a nice stay.” The man’s expression was unchanged, without any apparent emotion.
“Right,” Howard said again. “Thanks.”
He wheeled his case towards the stairs but was intercepted by someone emerging from a pair of heavy wooden double doors to one side. “Howie Bloch!”
Howard winced, but couldn’t help smiling. At last, some normalcy. Something familiar. “Dean Stringer. How many times do I have to tell you not to call me Howie?” His mother had called him that, her soft voice plaintive as she mollified him after another of his father’s alcoholic outbursts. His mother’s own breath sour with bourbon and cigarettes and surrender. He’d always promised himself any marriage of his would never be like theirs. Instead he’d managed to make one so dull it had withered on the vine and died.
Dean Stringer smiled. “Howard, sorry. Good to see you, man!”
“You too.”
They shook hands, Dean’s grip firm and vigorous. “You believe this place? Like something from… I don’t even know!”
“It’s pretty weird.”
“The boss man says it’s important to be here this particular Halloween. Reckons it’s a perfect time for company growth.”
“Perfect time?”
“Alignment of stars or some shit.” Stringer laughed, shrugged. “Great location for us, though, right? Try selling these people Halloween décor, that’d be like selling snow to the eskimoes, am I right? Really test your skills, Mr Regional Sales Manager of the Year.”
Howard laughed. “That was last year.”
“Maybe this year too! You’ll find out in three days.”
“We’ll see.” Honestly, Howard doubted he would qualify. He worked well, always had, but the slow dissolution of life with Skye, particularly over the last few months as the breakdown gained momentum, had certainly affected his performance. It must have affected his sales, even though he had met all his targets. Someone else would surely have exceeded theirs by more.
“Drink!” Dean exclaimed. “Come on.”
“My bag,” Howard said weakly. “I’ve only just driven in, I feel… rumpled.”
“A drink first!”
The hotel bar was busy with Day & Gohn Inc. staff and the buzz of life and activity was like a bath in itself. Howard drank his first beer reluctantly, but soon relaxed and met others he knew well, new employees he hadn’t met before. He felt isolated among the crowd, but bourbon followed beer and in an hour he was warm and laughing, not sparing a thought for life beyond the job.
Dizzy and staggering, he fumbled the key into the lock of 315, left his clothes on the floor as he fell into bed a little after midnight. The sheets were so cold they felt damp, the high ceiling with pressed metal edges spotted with blackened mould and
rippled with water stains, but he didn’t think much about it before sleep closed over him like a wave.
***
Howard woke from dreams of rolling seas and curdled stomachs. Of leaning over the sides of creaking boats with peeling paint, staring into gloomy depths where things unrecognisable looped and flew. His mouth was dry and furry, his head thick.
He staggered from bed, went into the small bathroom to piss, and winced at the yellow-stained toilet bowl, the rust streaked tub with its dripping shower head, lumpy with lime scale. But relieved, and revitalised with a long drink, though the water was bitter and hard, he returned to the room and its small window. His view looked south over the harbour. He smiled. The rain had eased, though the skies were still slate, and people milled in the street. Some buildings seemed to be shops with their doors open. Everything appeared more alive, more intact, than it had in the rain-soaked night before. Howard was glad of that. After a breakfast in the bustling hotel dining room – bustling only due to his fellow company staff – he headed into the main conference rooms and was soon lost in the business of sales districts, new products, electronic gadgets to hide around the house to turn it into a terrifying haunted experience. These were things he understood.
During lunch he was slapped hard on the back by Geoffrey Day, CEO. The man was tall and broad with a wide face and protuberant eyes. Not so pale as the desk clerk of the night before, Howard was nonetheless struck by their similarity.
“Good to see you, Bloch!” Day exclaimed. “All well?”
“Absolutely!” Howard lied, thoughts of Skye slipping back into the cracks between his thoughts, and hurried away.
By evening he was back in the bar, sampling the food and more of the booze. One day down, two to go, then the party. He began to relax. Dinner was ordinary, an uninspiring fish stew with hard, tasteless bread, but he and Dean had decided to go further afield the next day and explore the town, find restaurants to try. Thankful though he was to have Dean nearby, he had trouble connecting with anyone else, the faces all blurring into one seething mass. He shouldn’t be here, not really. He was made remote by thoughts of home and Skye. And that made him tense and bitter, hurt by the thought their marriage was done. They should have had kids. He should have insisted. He smarted that now they never would. But it wasn’t too late…
Avoiding conversation, Howard found himself on a weathered leather bench seat when a slim, dark-haired woman of young middle age sat beside him. He estimated she might be five or six years younger than his grizzled thirty-nine, and she retained an attractiveness that spoke of a youth turning eyes wherever she went. As general conversation lulled she smiled at him, held out a long-fingered, slim hand.
“Darya.”
“Howard. Darya is a lovely name.” He took her hand, glanced down at its icy coolness.
“I never could get used to New England winters. It’s why I went away. I’m always cold!”
“It’s barely autumn yet.”
She gave a shrug. “Yet already freezing.”
“And so damp here too,” Howard said.
“Always. It means ‘sea’, by the way.”
“What does?”
“Darya. It’s Iranian.”
“Oh, right. You’re Iranian?”
“No, my parents just liked it. I’m New England born and bred.”
Howard laughed. “Yet you never got used to the winters.”
“No, that’s why I went away.”
A silence fell, a moment of awkward strangeness following the awkward conversation. Darya flickered another smile and Howard sucked in a quick breath, tried to rein in sudden disorientation. “Drink?” he said.
Darya visibly relaxed, eyes crinkling. “Yes! Vodka and soda?”
“You got it.”
Dean stood at the bar, half a smile pulling up one side of his mouth like he’d been caught by a fisherman.
“What are you grinning about?”
Dean nodded back towards the table in the corner. “Chatting up the new girl, eh?”
“New is she?”
“I haven’t seen her before. No one I spoke to has. Must be new.”
Howard grunted. “And I’m not chatting her up.”
“What, because you’re married? What happens on tour, stays on tour, buddy. I won’t tell your wife.”
“Gee, thanks! How’s your wife?”
Dean grimaced. “Honestly, I don’t think we’ll be together much longer. I’m feeling a bit lost, truth be told. Long story, I’ll tell you later.”
Howard nodded, unsure what to say. He was certainly the last person to offer advice. Dean gathered up four glasses in a tenuous two-handed grip and returned to his table where several employees sat laughing and talking over one another drunkenly.
Howard waited at the bar and eventually the woman serving turned her attention to him. He startled slightly, convinced for a moment it was the desk clerk from the night before wearing a straggly ash-blonde wig. Their resemblance to each other was uncanny, but the woman had a kind of fatty lump just below her bottom lip and eyes a pale grey where the man’s had been sickly green. They must surely be related, though. Family business, Howard presumed. He ordered the drinks, bourbon and coke for himself, and returned to Darya.
Their conversation was messy, continued to be awkward, but they drank more and cared less. Darya moved closer, put a hand on his arm, his knee, his thigh. In her presence he felt dizzy and weirdly dislocated. He repeatedly pushed away thoughts of Skye, playing over and over in the back of his mind those last words.
Is there us any more?
I guess not.
The evening rolled on and the bar became ever less occupied, then Darya leaned forward, whispering. Her lips were cold against his ear, but the words heated him. “Shall we go upstairs?”
“My room?” he asked, trembling like a teenager.
She nodded, slipped her fingers around his, gently pulled him up and away. They climbed the stairs quickly, stumbling drunkenly and giggling. In his room they didn’t speak again, plucked and fumbled with each other’s clothes, kissing every newly revealed bit of skin. Her tongue was cold and brackish in his mouth, as though she had drunk vodka and seawater all night not vodka and soda, but the taste wasn’t unpleasant. As they kissed he became dizzier still, lost in lust and booze.
She was cold all over, the poor thing not lying about never getting warm. He gasped as she took his cock in her mouth, his shock as much from the icy chill of her tongue as the sharp sexual pleasure. They rolled onto the bed, he atop her, and inside she was as cold as out, and though the fact discomforted him, he was too drunk and too rampant to care. The booze made him clumsy, but gave him time and the sex was good. She bucked beneath him, staring up with wide eyes as though she couldn’t believe her own orgasm, and that inflamed him and he was spent, explosively and totally. Still without words they rolled over and entwined. As sleep stole over him he realised she was still cold.
***
Howard dreamed of a city underwater. It’s twisting spires stretched up through waters strangely clear, the surface of the ocean unseen far above. This was no earthly sea, that he knew without doubt, intrinsically. This place existed everywhere, just below the surface of real life. It could be entered from anywhere, go from it to anywhere else, like it flowed intertwined with the threads of the tapestry of reality.
Howard walked its streets, marvelling at serpentine architecture, rounded byways, the smoothness of every feature. Straps of kelp rose in clumps, undulating in soft currents. He came to a temple in the city’s centre, a tower of intertwined columns winding upwards, surrounded by smaller spiralling towers buttressed to the middle with arcs of dark stone. Giant double doors, forty feet high, thirty feet wide, inscribed with disturbing symbols, swung silently open and he realised everywhere was silent. Inside the temple, rows of pews rose from the ground as if carved. O
r as though they had been grown like intricately managed coral. Hundreds of people occupied them, rocking gently as if moved like the kelp by deep, gentle waves. All had hoods or long hair shadowing their faces, not a visage visible in the dimness. An altar at the end of the temple stood on a raised dais, impossibly tall figures stalking slowly around it. Whip-thin and angular in their movements, they reached long, stick-like arms towards the congregation. Those arms bent once about one-third along, the forearm too short. Then they bent again further up, double-elbows uncannily placed as they gestured complicated patterns, a silent sign-language Howard could not understand but yearned to know. He realised he was holding his breath, had been all along. For how long? Hours? He knew if he breathed in he would drown, but suddenly felt like he was drowning anyway. And part of him longed for that watery suffocation. Panicking, he gasped, ice cold salt water flooding his mouth and lungs.
He jerked awake, bounced on the cold bed, heart pounding, breath short. He tasted salt water, but realised that would be from kissing Darya, not from the dream. Wouldn’t it? He rolled over and saw she was gone. Disappointment carved a hole in him. His brain was foggy with sleep, with drink, with the remains of the powerfully clear dream. He lurched from bed to piss, the air cold against his damp skin. His feet squidged against the hard, worn carpet as he walked, leaving a trail of wet footprints. Still drunk, confused, bereft, he ignored it, pissed, and fell back into bed and a restless, dreamless sleep.
***
“You’re not the only one who got lucky last night!” Dean was enthusiastic over breakfast in the hotel dining room of dark wood and sallow serving staff. They looked a lot like each other. Just how big was the family running this business?
“What do you mean?” Howard had a headache from ruptured sleep and too much bourbon, his mood sullied by that and by guilt over what he had done. He and Skye weren’t finished yet, and Darya hadn’t even stayed the night, creeping out like it was nothing but a booty call. There had been a text message from Skye when he awoke: Sweetheart, we really need to talk. When you get back, let’s take a break somewhere. We need time together.
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